Data integrity is a common concern in real-time and critical systems. The corruption of data or the misoperation of one or more components of the system has potential to lead to catastrophic failure of such a system. Accordingly, techniques have been developed to verify the integrity of stored data as well as the components which store and process such data. However, these conventional techniques tend to be either software-intensive or tend to require considerable additional hardware, thereby increasing the cost and complexity of implementing these conventional data integrity verification techniques, as well as introducing a considerable delay or overhead, therefore overburdening such real-time or critical systems. Accordingly, an integrated data integrity verification technique would be advantageous.